Creating a product isn’t just about getting the stages of new product development right, it’s also about managing the product once it’s been launched and then throughout its lifetime.

Crowdfunding is changing the way entrepreneurs bring new products to market. It has allowed them to raise money, build brand awareness, and join a broader conversation with large numbers of potential backers, all while still in the product development process.

WaterSeer made such a huge impact during their crowdfunding campaign that it surpassed its goal by 300%. This was the first-time Don and Nancy raised funds online and were blown away by the overwhelming response. But not all of it was good. With enormous attention, comes negativity, naysayers, trolls, critics… you name it.

Elon Musk once said, “When something is important enough, you do it even when the odds are not in your favor.” Remember in the last blog post we spoke about the concept phase in product development? Our crowdfunding campaign was conducted during the concept phase of our development. A detail that caused some to doubt the efficacy of our design.

However, once the team had agreed on an overall concept, the engineers started work on the prototype. The design goes through iterations of conceptual drawings, then to modeling and finally to the production of a functioning prototype for testing. At each stage, the engineers communicated their progress and incorporated design feedback. As I’m sure you can imagine, this meant at times there were disagreements, modifications, changes and even general excitement as it progressed to a production ready prototype.

As we move forward to testing in the next few weeks, our team will look at safety, function, durability and market acceptance of the product. And the results from that testing may very well result in changes to the WaterSeer before manufacturing of the final product.

Pretty exciting, right?!

We believe in WaterSeer. Our community believes in WaterSeer. And when you want something so badly to change the world, well…you find a way to beat the odds.